Good evening, everyone.

My name is Coyo, I'm a math major in college. I'm studying bitcoin as part of my eventual career.

I study subcultures in my free time for SCIENCE.

I think bitcoin has a massive future, and will be THE slow-but-sure payment method of choice, and be comparable to digital gold.

Payments with bitcoin will always be slow (taking as long as 4 hours to complete 6 confirms), but it will be reliable and anonymous.

OpenTransactions, if it matures, will allow for faster transactions, and Ripple may allow for something interesting, but really, Bitcoin is proven, many people make a living on bitcoin alone.

There are people, in the dark recesses of the Internet, who are quietly collecting bitcoins, and believe, for good reason, that bitcoin price will not only remain stable in years to come, but the price will increase over time. There are people, in the shadowy corners of the Internet, who believe that The Future is Now. Bitcoin is an essential part of The Future.

My goal is to study bitcoin, and being the agorist classic liberal entrepreneur that I am, find a solid market demand and tap it.

I am considering designing and building a bitcoin futures contracts trading website (through existing exchanges) so that vendors and merchants can accept bitcoin and be able to sell it at a stabilized price.

i like.

I'll be sure to take a look.

To the OP: good luck, there any many options, so it can be confusing at first. you'll get the hang of it, though.

1) All fiat currencies are garbage to begin with

2) Paypal was never really an option

3) Accepting credit cards is prohibitively expensive

4) State corruption and incompetence disrupts the entire free market

5) Centralize authorities are vulnerable to being raided at gunpoint

6) The credit system is ridiculously insecure and protected merely by bookkeeping

7) The state and coerced taxation (nuff said)

i love how bitcoin resembles the brain in that as soon as you get a reward, the network downregulates by itself to diminish the reward.

but to answer the original OPs question, yes, they should have ASIC-based bitcoin miners out by now. there's too much money to be made to ignore the market.

ideally, you should use different passwords for every account. have you considered using keepass2 or another similar secure password manager?

you can keep the keepass2 passwords and such encrypted on a usb dongle around your neck or on your neckchain, but that's meant as a backup, in case you lose the computer with keepass2 installed, or in case you need to use a school, work, or library computer.

but ideally, you'd use something like that. a single password across many bitcoin websites isnt exactly ideal. just saying.

the 8 connection limit is the limit of outgoing connections that the reference client makes if you cannot receive incoming connections.

bitcoin, by default, although this can certainly be changed, receives incoming connections on tcp port 8333.

if you keep your bitcoin node online consistently, with your port forwarded (you can learn how to port forward on other forums or sites, such as http://portforward.com/help/portforwarding.htm which explains it fairly well) you should collect many tcp connections over time.

all in all, if you have 8 connections, your bitcoin client is working, but only nominally. if you accept incoming connections (thus helping to allow others to join the bitcoin network who cannot receive incoming connections) your confirms are likely to happen more quickly (even if only slightly. your milage may vary. )

Hello, I'm Coyo. I've been watching bitcoin and raving to all of my friends and family about it and the possibilities of what could happen society-wide if it were widely accepted by vendors as payment.

I've accidentally glazed my credit union teller's eyes yapping about bitcoin. I'm excitable.

I know enough about bitcoin to understand that bitcoin works via a public record, the blockchain, that you possess private keys in your wallet in order to post signed records to the public accounting record. it's all based on a huge chain of signatures and public key cryptography. when you lose your wallet, you lose your private keys, and thus the money is irrevocably unclaimed in the blockchain itself.

the exceptions to this is if you use deterministic keypair generation to generate a bitcoin address (a public key, or identity), and simply memorize the passphrase used as the seed to the keypair generation. this is also known as a brain wallet.

I know enough about bitcoin to see the genius concept, and am humiliated that i never thought of a transaction-chain concept using a distributed public record for payment bookkeeping. Oh well.

The idea is really simple once you actually understand it, but it's so jarringly genius at the same time that i'm so very glad people rallied behind it.

About me: I'm a mathematics and business major in college. Considering studying cryptograhy and finance. Havent decided yet.

My primary interests are in overlay networks such as tor, gnunet, and retroshare, and in other P2P projects such as bitcoin, bittorrent, and sesha.